1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data recovery, and more particularly to systems and methods for event driven recovery management.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, recovery management has been overseen by various systems that keep track of data being written to a storage medium. Recovery management may be necessary to recover data that has been damaged by a disk crash, a virus, erroneous deletions, overwrites, or other various user and logical errors. Numerous other reasons are cited by companies and individuals for requiring access to data as it existed at one point in time.
Back-up methods for storing data are necessary before the data can be recovered. Back-up methods may include copying files or databases so that they will be preserved in case of equipment failure or other catastrophe. Some processes may involve copying backup files to a hard disk from backup media in order to return data to its original condition. Other techniques may include periodically copying contents of all or a designated portion of data from the data's usual storage device to a cartridge device so the data will not be lost in the event of a hard disk crash.
Backup procedures, such as those described above, require a great deal of processing power from a server performing the backups of the data. For this reason, backup procedures may be offloaded from a server so that the time ordinarily devoted to backup functions can be used to carry out other server tasks. For example, in some environments, an intelligent agent may be utilized to offload the backup procedures. The intelligent agentmay take a “snapshot” of a computer's data at a specific time so that if future changes cause a problem, the system and data may be restored to the way they were at the time of the “snapshot.” The snapshot may consist of an image of pointers that indicate a location of data being backed up.
Continuous backup systems may utilize snapshots. These continuous backup systems typically back up all data whenever a change is made. Thus, one storage snapshot may be made for every instance data is modified.
Once copies of the data have been made in some manner, data recovery may be employed to retrieve the copies of the data. Data recovery seeks to return the data to a state where it existed before certain changes were made to the data. The data may be recovered to different points in time, depending upon the state of the data a user wants to access.
Data recovery methods often require a user to know to what point in time the data is to be recovered. A tape, disk, or other back up medium can then be searched in order to recover the data as it existed at that particular point in time. Unfortunately, the user may not comprehend the best point in time to which to recover the data.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for event driven recovery management.